Torrents can unfortunately die after a period of time if no one continues seeding it or if they don't use a permanent web based seeder, which doesn't appear to be the case.
Soft size limit means "If your repository excessively impacts our infrastructure, you might receive an email from GitHub Support asking you to take corrective action." - I know people who have received such emails.
Most model releases happen through Hugging Face which does not have such a size limit.
https://docs.github.com/billing/managing-billing-for-git-lar...
> Each pack costs $5 per month, and provides 50 GiB of bandwidth and 50 GiB for storage
So they would need to pay for 6 data packs (or $30) for every 300gb download.
(https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-git-...)
The other approach would be to use AWS S3 or other cloud providers which would cost them money every time someone downloads their code, which is not their prerogative to pay for when they are releasing something for free. Torrents seems like the only good solution, unless someone hosts this on the cloud for free for everyone.
Still, as far as sentiment goes, yeah git for model weights is an impedance mismatch for sure!
It's not actually a limitation in git itself, especially if you use Git LFS. People use Git for Unreal projects and big ones can be half a terabyte or more in size.
> Torrents can unfortunately die after a period of time if no one continues seeding it or if they don't use a permanent web based seeder, which doesn't appear to be the case.
So to can web links, especially when they are 300 GB and egressing out of AWS at $0.09/GB or worse (in non-US regions). Each full download would cost $27 at that rate. 10,000 downloads would cost $270,000.
Sure you could go for something with a better cost model like R2, but you can't beat using one or two unmetered connections on a VPN to constantly seed on Bittorrent, your pricing would be effectively free and reliability would be higher than if you just exposed a HTTP server on the Internet in such a way.
There's a lot of seeders on the torrent that are actually AWS ips too, all with similar configurations which makes me believe that it's probably xAI running them
> on a VPN
That's unnecessary, you don't need a VPN?
A torrent is less likely to go down in the short term.
Twitter/X has their own massive infrastructure and bandwidth to seed this indefinitely.
